


M is for Murder

by AustralianSpy



Series: Tales de Jim Moriarty [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Character Study, Childhood, Criminal Masterminds, Developing Character, Existentialism, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-19
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-24 00:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/933039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AustralianSpy/pseuds/AustralianSpy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The events that molded Jim Moriarty into who he is, and a collection examining his dubious character.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Devil Wears Westwood

They always say that when you make a deal with the Devil, you sell your soul as soon as the deal is struck. Jim Moriarty shook hands with the Devil, certainly; but he had no soul to trade that was his own, and the handshake was done as equals. After all, what was Hell to Jim Moriarty? He was a devil in his own right. A devil that dwelt on earth in his allotted time. Hell had no use for two rulers — or should it be said, a new patriarch. For it could be stated with absolute certainty that should Jim Moriarty be allowed to dwell in the underworld, he would sit on a burning throne and wear a crown of thorns within a fortnight, if he had his way. 

So Hell wouldn’t keep him. It couldn’t. It would take more than nine Circles to contain a man like him. He was a spider, a puppet-master, and a soulless thing that was unrivaled in his darkness. Death wasn’t final for Jim Moriarty; far from it. 

Death was only the beginning.

He’d ruined Sherlock Holmes. He’d dragged the great detective to his knees. The price had been a bullet eaten, but that was such a small price to pay to see his grand scheme — one of many — completed. But he had so much more to do. He could hardly leave his sprawling criminal empire to crumble and flounder due to his absence. No, that wouldn’t do at all. He was Jim Moriarty. Jim Moriarty was for- _ever_. 

The commonfolk could do for a devil among them, again. A devil quite dashingly dressed in Westwood. After all, their lives would be so /boring/ without him. He owed them some continued entertainment — at their own expense, of course. 

So, what’s a bullet to the head to Jim Moriarty?

Nothing at all. 

The devil lives. Let the games begin.


	2. The Theatre

On certain occasions, Jim Moriarty would pretend the world around him was nothing more than a play.

Enter generic, groveling crime-boss. Cue back-and-forth dialogue and tedious bartering between himself and the client. Close with a threat, resulting in a deal. Exit generic, groveling crime-boss. End scene.

The play was always broken up into three acts:

Act One: The Job Proposal.

Act Two: The Game.

Act Three: Closure and Payment.

Sometimes, there would be an additional act shoved in the middle, almost always between Acts Two and Three. The Interruption. Some tediously mundane heckler forcing their way onto his stage and disrupting his scene. They’d be dealt with severely, if possible. Then they’d be swept aside like the annoyance they were, and the play would go on.

It entertained Moriarty to think this way. At least for a little while. He could fancy himself the director, and the willing and unwilling participants of his schemes were his actors. He could – and did – make them dance at his whim, puppeteer-ing them about as he so chose to.

He supposed that maybe his plays, as a series, were very much a large-scale reinterpretation of _Waiting for Godot_. It was Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, in which two characters incessantly relived the same day again and again, shadowing the prior day’s actions and foreshadowing those to come. Moriarty did much the same, really. He took a job, he finished the job, he was paid for the job. Then he took another job, finished it, and was paid. It was so redundant. It was no wonder he had to pretend his life was a theatrical production in order to find some sort of amusement in it.

The only differentiating factor between his so-called plays and _Waiting for Godot_ was his distinct lack of a complimenting partner. The Vladimir to his Estragon, or vice versa. The play centered around a duo that was quite incomplete without one or the other. Moriarty’s? Well, he was not just the director: he was also the star actor. But alas, he did not share the spotlight with another. It was more by choice than anything else. Why should he bother with others? It was so much mindless effort, to please another and feed a relationship. Moriarty felt himself above all of that nonsense.

Thus, he was very much alone in his endeavors. He thought he liked it best that way. And in any case, he could never respect a man or woman who could not match his intellect. And there were oh-so few out there who could. If you were any less, you were merely a pawn. If you were any _more_ , you did not exist.

So, naturally, with such a small selection for him, Moriarty remained the world’s least-eligible bachelor.

But that was beside the point, wasn’t it? He was an actor and a director. That was most important.

Though even _that_ got boring, at times.

End scene.


	3. Happiness

“Are ye happy, bossman?”

Sebastian Moran had asked Jim Moriarty this, one time, and he’d responded without a moment of hesitation.

“Never.”

He was being ironic, of course. Jim did not measure happiness with the same strokes as the men around him. To him, happiness was a mere absence of boredom. Whether he felt anger or sadness at the time was of no consequence. The important matter was that there was a moment in which he ceased to be irrelevant and became something much more. He was doing, and causing, and this was happiness. It was the state of action and seeing action. To him, happiness was not something that riddled his everyday life in spurts and random starts at little, simple things that were beyond his control. Life did not offer those things to him, unbidden. Life was a state of existing, just barely; flat-lined. Life was floating on a rock swung about by gravity, greedily consuming oxygen in a struggle to continue just-barely existing. That was all it was to him; all it really was at all, though none seemed to see this. And perhaps – resenting his poor evaluation of it – that was why Life tormented him with boredom. Jim Moriarty would never be content to simply ‘be’. He would always have to have more and see more and do more. His happiness was harder to obtain and even more so to correctly define. It was not an emotion. It was the seconds in which he did more than ‘be’.

By societal standards, happiness was something else entirely. Jim could not accept their definition. It expected light and warmth. It was the absence of the pain and darkness and cruel intentions that had been an integral part of his meager existence since the very beginning. It was a preposterous notion and one accepted only by the ignorant fools who failed to see life as it was. The usual idea of happiness made his skin crawl and his stomach heave and every fiber of him wish to see the world erupt in a catastrophic blaze to erase the concept from the universe. At least then, in that moment, he would reach his own happiness. In the seconds in which he would witness that fiery end he would be momentarily entertained, and thus content. But otherwise? Otherwise, Jim had not been happy for three decades. Not by the ordinary measures. And his standards allowed for too much hollowness in-between the flashes of contentment. This was a thing he could not change.

Only briefly did he ever experience society-defined happiness. When in Sebastian’s presence, there were instances. Jim was not aware of this, however, and would deny it if he was. Having gone without the feeling for so long, he had an immeasurably difficult time identifying it when he did. Luckily, those were the only moments in which he found himself immersed in the emotion. If it happened any more often, he might come to notice it and be appalled that he had stooped to so low a level; disgust that he felt things simpler minds did as well.

Love was another concept Jim Moriarty rejected in its usual manifestation. Love was more fleeting, more fickle than ‘happiness’. It had no place in his life except as a tool by which he could manipulate others. Love allowed for weakness; for others to be used against him. It was – like happiness – an abstract and flimsy concept by which men measured their lives and defined themselves. Futilely and foolishly so. He had no love for anyone or anything. He might profess that he did, flippantly, but there was no feeling behind it. There was no thing that stirred in him emotion deep enough to merit ‘love’. He might desire, but that was purely in a material sense. An urge to possess. That was his greedy nature, and no product of love.

Jim’s spurning of those concepts as the world saw them was no fault of his own. His life had been lived in the absence of them. His home had offered neither, so he had never experienced them to their full extent. Never did he grow accustomed to them, or come to anticipate them from anyone or anything. Their absence in his world was ordinary. He expected no more and no less. How could he? He was a thing just barely existing, like the rest of the men around him. Only he was more acutely aware of this than any of them. He had the intelligence and ambition to be more than any of them ever would, but Life would not allow it. No matter his accomplishments, he would exist, and then he would not. Riches and power meant nothing, truly. They would not grant him the ability to do more than be; only to exist in a comfort that did not at all comfort him.

So perhaps it was no wonder that Jim Moriarty seemed so unceasingly dissatisfied with his own existence.

He lacked the standards by which to properly measure and define it.


End file.
